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Archive for the tag “Stephen King”

I’m a damn good reader. No disorders that I know of, comprehension through the roof, the ability to cold read, out loud, in public, strong as it gets. I’ve been reading since I was a little over a year old, or so they said when I was growing up.

No, I’m just not a reader.

I grew up reading every day. Prose, mostly, and that, contained in the sports section of the LA Times. I never read comics, except for the papers on Sunday, and I was never encouraged to pick up a book during my childhood, except by command of teachers, and then, not until high school. Along the way, I read some things, mostly by accident. Some Peter Benchley… sharks fascinated me… and some pulp journalism style stuff you could find on the book rack at the grocery store while my mom stood in line to pay. Besides that, the only two things I read like they meant something were Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, the World Book Encyclopedia, and the 1973 Baseball Encyclopedia.

But none of that is reading.

In the years that I should have been indulging my creative consciousness on everything from Swift to Burroughs and Dickens to Baum, I was memorizing batting averages, the etymology of 19th century English words, and the names the crew gave the mechanical shark in the movie Jaws. I wasn’t reading, I was collecting… nonsense, mostly. I read quickly. I read to absorb, to obtain, and to satisfy curiosity, not for the love of the words themselves.

At least that’s the way reading was explained to me. That it was a love affair with words, and with the stories that the words would unfold for me, if I would only let it be so. As you might imagine, school was a nightmare for me. I got by, barely. Not by reading, but by listening. I listened to every word the teachers said, and made copious notes. Page after page of classroom notes, writing down every meaningless detail of these frustrated storytellers, never once looking inside the textbooks they ordered us to read. Because of this, obviously, math was a killer. English was hard because all the questions on tests were neatly tucked away inside the books I didn’t read. History worked for me, because teachers of history fancy themselves “historians”, and would rather act out the full contents of the books themselves, than leave the interpretation of history to the transcribers of history. I took notes, and answered the questions from them.

That didn’t work out so well, in high school, or in college, after.

I gave reading one more shot in my 20s.

The girl I was seeing was a reader of book club selections, and I would read books over her shoulder, at night. For a while, I became a reader like she was a reader. Picking novels that sounded interesting based on my already-cultivated curiosities. Bad sports stories, the occasional adventure, and spooky stuff. Spooky stuff that would have caused childhood me to keep both hands and both feet inside the covers at night. Blatty’s Exorcist. King’s Stand. A bunch of other crap I barely remember.

In this time, I realized that I read the way a cow eats, deliberately, and not in any hurry. Not the way a predator hurriedly consumes its prey, but slowly, chewing on words and phrases, taking them all in, and then barfing them back up in the form of re-reading without actually finishing the book first. It took me forever to read a book this way, but when I was done, I maybe knew the stories better than the authors.

Then the girl became wife. The wife stopped reading. I stopped reading.

Because I’m not a reader.

At this point in this story, I’ll save you the exposition of the next 30-something years. I’ll just tell you that, while I am not a reader, I am reading again. I have to. Something I discovered about the silence that only reading brings. The silence that, I didn’t know until now, brings healing to a soul that fed on only noise, and a mind that, for most of a lifetime, knew only confusion and pain. Words and stories that should bring healing, and a minimum of confusion and pain. From Murakami to Bradbury, Goldman to Gibran. I will read these, soon.

It’s November 14th, 2015. Tomorrow marks the half-way point for what I, in the past, have mocked harder than France secretly mocks Jerry Lewis. Yep, NaBloPoMo, or National Blog Posting Month. A time when normally shunned people rise up from their nerd coffins and attempt to make the internet explode. A time when the average blogger, cyber reader, or Bloody Awful Poet tries to post more in one month than in the previous twelve months combined. I’ve known bloggers who, following participating in NaBloPoMo, have taken ill, quit jobs, lost relationships, and otherwise simply dropped out of society.

Having said that, here are a few observations I’ve made through the first two weeks of this self-inflicted Blogmageddon…

Observation number one. Contrary to popular myth, THIS SHIT IS EASY.

I used to look at regularly published posts as something to be feared… even dreaded. Like uncompensated on-call hours for that blue-collar job that you make-believe is SO COOL, but is really just a life-suck that pays a lot closer to minimum wage than your used car salesman of a boss is willing to admit. Putting your shitty life on hold for a few weeks to write what amounts to three chapters of a bloated Stephen King novel is chump change in comparison to sitting on your ass waiting for a drive from LAX to Culver City for twenty bucks… minus the gas YOU have to pay for out of your own pocket.

Life lesson number one. Work sucks, but we all need the bucks.

And posting everyday breaks up the monotony of being insulted by working a ninety-hour week, and having the guy who signs your paycheck tell you, with a straight face, that you really only worked a fifty.

Observation number two. You don’t know what complaining really is till you learn what complaining REALLY IS.

People in France have a right to complain. Not blue-collar workers in Los Angeles. Not blue-balled bloggers in their mommy’s basement. People with real problems have a right to complain. While “hard is hard”, some hards are harder than others. Bitching about blogging, much like bitching about your job, means you have one… and possibly both. Blog or don’t blog. Work or don’t work. Blogging every day has taught me that if you can do it, and choose to do it, you give up your rights to bitch about doing it.

Life lesson number two. Quit yer bitching.

And yes, I mean ME.

Observation number three. In a month that has taught me more than four years of high school, thirty years of marriage, and fifty-four years of life, here it is.

Do what makes you happy. If that means blogging every single day for the rest of your life, then do it. If that means working a job that doesn’t allow time for blogging… or for that matter, a life… then do that. And if life gives you the clarity and the opportunity to know and do what you love, then jump the hell on it and ride it hard off into the sunset.

Life lesson number three. Oh, fuck! There IS NO number three!

Just do what I said. Because, for once in my life, I’m going to. Whatever that entails. Which, at the time of this writing, I have no idea what it is. But I’m going to find it and do it.